I’ve heard this argument—“Why would you want to give your money to a business that doesn’t want to serve you anyway?” Well, in theory, no, you don’t. However, allowing this to be “the answer” just leads to the type of isolation, separation and de facto segregation that makes people think that discrimination is OK or justified. Because I think there are a lot of people in the world who don’t know, or at least think they know, any gay people very well. They don’t have much opportunity to interact with them, and so they find it easy to make judgements about a faceless group of people. (Or to judge them based on some stereotype they saw on a sitcom once.) But if they were forced to interact with real people on a regular basis, then they would get to KNOW them. They would realize that they are human beings too. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, just like every demographic, race, religion, etc. But you owe them the opportunity to prove you wrong.

To quote a poignant episode of the Simpsons:

“Homer, I won your respect, and all I had to do was save your life. Now, if every gay man could just do the same, you’d be set.”